AgnosticA Spirited ManifestoAvailable April 4, 2016

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus. The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!). It inspired several spoofs, including this one here. Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list; by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

I’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were. The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about? This man who carved such a huge profile in history? He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer. It was about my decision as a Jew. Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away: just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine. It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable. But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor. Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam. Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know? What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental? Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider. It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place. Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad: by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith; it humanizes it. And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

The relevant term here is “fencing the Communion.” You know the little fence at the front of the church where you lean your elbows while waiting for the Elements to reach you? (Maybe not — ask a Catholic.) There was a huge early battle about who had to stay outside that railing and who was entitled to enter. Territoriality. Tribal. Strongest when the group is uneasy about its identity and afraid of dilution by outsiders. (Check the Mexican border. Heck, even the Canadian border.) Writing about American Indians without BEING American Indian is a mortal crime because it becomes harder and harder to define an American Indian.

Yes, Lesley you are SO right on here! And even if you’re a former believer, believers still automatically assume that a writer is out to, at best, criticize, at worst, completely demolish all they hold dear. People become so defensive that they can’t see that what a writer might really want to do is to explore, to understand, to express…..

Very well said:).
Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam. Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

The advantage of a writer who doesn’t share the ideas/beliefs of the subject, in your case a prophet whose life was centered exactly on those ideas/beliefs, is a much-needed unbiased perspective of what that man did.

The disadvantage could be not understanding the subject himself and missing out on the essence of why he did what he did.

I agree with you as a devout Muslim. In many verses in Quran Allah wants human-beings to contemplate but human- beings are afraid to contemplate about their faith. Or they are lazy or they simply doesn’t care about religion. They are culturally Jew , Christian or Muslim. They prefer to follow their forefathers religion not their own. When they pickup Revised addition of Bible how come they don’t ask this question: who has a right to revise God’s word? They are def, they are blind and impaired to think. My ten year old daughter was asking me about popular Belief about Jesus being son of God or being God. She asked me: don’t Christians think that Jesus died 2000 years ago if God died 2000 years ago who is running universe?and If Jesus couldn’t save himself how he is going to save them ? Or don’t they think how come eternal God dies?
Bible says God is one! Why they made him 3? She is also asking about Islam and She is developing her faith. Contemplating is the key. Who doesn’t contemplate doesn’t have real faith they copy others faith.

I don’t think Aslan was writing as a “Muslim”—though it may have effected his perspective. I havn’t read the book but from watching various interviews, Aslan, apparently, puts the illiterate Jewish carpenter from Nazareth into a historical context/time-period.
However,the picture of Jesus (pbuh) in the Quran is a Jewish man who is intelligent, literate, a good communicator, exceptionally skilled, and highly spiritual.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I think that the reporter did not use an intellectual point of view to question Aslan. Anyways, conservatism and closed minds always try to overlap what it is true. Also I think that his book is an academic book such as yours, books for academics, for open minded people, for intellectual people who think critically. Negative comments will always exist…

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith; it humanizes it. And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

I’ve just placed the order of your book, The First Muslim in India, it was very expensive, however, they have now priced it correctly. This shall be my third biography on Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be on him, which I’m going two read. The other two by Karen Armstrong and Safiur Rehman Mubarakpuri.

Thank you, Farrukh. And re The First Muslim, the UK edition is due out November 7. Since India is part of the ‘UK and Commonwealth’ distribution system, it should then be easily available in bookstores.

‘Zealot’? A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title. But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.” As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political. At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans. In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed. Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here. Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers. “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.” A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan. But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance. He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out. Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus. Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts. Which is not to blame the gospel writers. Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one. “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why. Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul. The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure: the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city. With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience: the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but. As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed. Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth. This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle: I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm. Free admission.)

Thank you Lesley for the review. It seems to be a very interesting book.

Annemarie Schimmel said in one of her books that, it does not matter what the fact was, what matters is, what people believe in. I suppose 3 billion plus people will continue to believe what they have been told for the last 2,000 years.

I was watching a fox news interview with him and I was surprised at how ignorant the interviewer was. For a US writer who writes on religion and who already wrote a book on Islam, it would be a surprise for him not to tackle Christianity.

Greetings:
Please excuse me, Lesley, if this has been covered, as I haven’t quite managed to read through every email here (your About page). But I am wondering if you have been interrogated as thoroughly (credentials, etc.) by the “western media” regarding your book on the Prophet Muhammad (salallahu alayhi wa sallam) as heavily as Reza Aslan has on this book of his on (the prophet) Jesus (alayhi wa sallam). It occurred to me to ask this, having read and found certainly thought-provoking your fine book on the Shi’a split, and on Muhammad, and having viewed a good interviewer talking with him from Huffington Post, and read about the Fox interviewer, who (without viewing it) seems to have been less so. Have you been put on the defensive at all?

Oh yes. Not as publicly, and not by “western media,” but some conservative Muslims have made it clear that for them, my Jewishness is as suspicious as Reza’s Muslimness is to Fox News. Basically they ask the same question: what made you, as a Muslim/Jew, write about Jesus/Muhammad. And behind that question, first, a challenge as to your “right” to do so, and second, the assumption of an “agenda” — in Reza’s case, anti-Christian, in my case, anti-Muslim. On the other hand, many thinking Muslims have welcomed The First Muslim, as you’ll see if you scroll through comments on posts about the book, just as many thinking Christians have welcomed Reza’s book. Humanizing history doesn’t undermine faith, as conservatives seem to imagine; both Jesus and Muhammad are not less but more remarkable when seen in their lived context and experience.
I’ll be posting at greater length about all this very soon.

It’s a shame you have to entertain comments from some of my bone-headed co-religionists, who can’t see past your Jewishness. They tend to define themselves against what they’re not as to opposed to what they are and have done a fine job of covering beauty with filth. It reminds me of the Month Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition.